Welcome to 2025

In just 17 short months, we'll step into 2025, a year poised to cast a long, ominous shadow over our hyperconnected world. As we tap into the digital ether, digest forecasts from respected sources, and absorb unsettling bulletins from threat reports, breach trends, and government advisories (CISA, DHS, FBI), we begin to weave together a foreboding portrait of the impending future.

The Year is 2025

The evolving legislative landscape looms large, with sweeping digital privacy laws soon to embrace the majority of the world's population and GDP. In a bid to quell the ransomware epidemic, countries are taking action—30% are already erecting legal barriers to restrict ransom payments.

Cybersecurity expertise is non-negotiable. Half of all corporate boards have a cybersecurity specialist among their ranks, while 50% of CEOs will bear the weight of board-imposed cybersecurity performance requirements. Seven in ten CEOs are instilling a culture of resilience as their legal liabilities multiply.

Hybrid work is the norm while another wave of digital transformation is currently washing over your organization. Infosec Twitter has given way to LinkedIn, while the advent of personal bots aim to replace your reliance on traditional social networks.

But the catch is, half of us will have vacated our cybersecurity roles, with a quarter diving headlong into entirely new careers.

Our technological landscape is grim within enterprises. The stress of tech overload nudges us towards merging our web, cloud services, and apps under the umbrella of a single vendor. With our fate tied to this vendor, we hope they don't lose their keys. Advanced social engineering tactics, armed with Adversarial AI, deep fakes, and pretexting, are commonplace now, leading to business disruption and physical harm.

Weaponized OT is no longer just theoretical; it's a real, present danger causing actual casualties.

In this environment, managing vulnerabilities devolves into an all-consuming chore, with Shadow IT spreading unchecked. We continue to struggle to confidently claim to know all the assets we're defending. The majority of enterprises grapple with the concept of zero trust.

We are knee-deep in the "War of Inconvenience," wrestling with the harsh truth that we may have lost the battle. Regional power grid failures, FAA outages, and other infrastructural crises loom as very real possibilities, not just theoretical threats.

Back to Today

The story is far from over. America thrives on comeback narratives, and we stand at the brink of ours. But must we first face loss to win this war?

It's time we marshal our resources and brace for the fight that lies ahead. We must cultivate a cybermesh mentality and foster a genuine culture of security in our organizations. The answer lies within our ranks, not outside.

We need to foster a spirit of deep-seated collaboration, weaving together our architectural strategies and transformation initiatives into a single, unified whole. We need to ask ourselves the basics: Is it time to abandon the cloud? Has the Shared Responsibility Model failed us? What are the "Crown Jewels" we're striving to protect? Should Shadow IT be disciplinary?

Secure by Design and Secure by Default must be more than just slogans—they need to be our guiding principles. Risk-based decision-making with cybersecurity requirements should be our driving force, and an asset-centric approach to cyber defense is crucial.

As we navigate the complex and challenging road ahead, let's refocus on the fundamental principles of cybersecurity. Let's strip away the noise, the complexity, the distractions, and return to the essence of our task. Sometimes, getting back to basics is the most advanced strategy we can adopt.

Now is the time for radical collaboration.